A guard extension that compiles .less files to .css files when changed.

You will need to have Guard first.

Install the gem with:

gem install guard-less

Add an initial setup to your Guardfile with:

guard init less

Please read Guard usage doc.

guard 'less', :all_on_start => true, :all_after_change => true do
  watch(%r{^.*\.less$})
end

Please read Guard doc for more info about Guardfile DSL.

:all_after_change => [true|false]   # run on all files after any changed files
                                    # default: true

:all_on_start => [true|false]       # run on all the files at startup
                                    # default: true

:output => 'relative/path'          # base directory for output CSS files; if unset,
                                    # .css files are generated in the same directories
                                    # as their corresponding .less file
                                    # default: nil

:import_paths => ['lib/styles']     # an array of additional load paths to pass to the
                                    # LESS parser, used when resolving `@import`
                                    # statements
                                    # default: [] (see below)

By default, .css files will be generated in the same directories as their corresponding .less files (partials beginning with _ are always excluded). To customize the output location, pass the :output option as described above, and be sure to use a match group in the regular expression in your watch to capture nested structure that will be preserved, i.e.

guard 'less', :output => 'public/stylesheets' do
  watch(%r{^app/stylesheets/(.+\.less)$})
end

will result in app/stylesheets/forums/main.less producing CSS at public/stylesheets/forums/main.css.

As each .less file is parsed, the directory containing the file is automatically prepended to the import paths, so imports relative to your watched dirs like @import 'shared/_type-styles' should always work. You can supply additional paths with this option so that, for the ['lib/styles'] example, a file at lib/styles/reset.less could be imported without a qualified path as @import 'reset'.

Copyright (c) 2011 Brendan Erwin and contributors

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.